Shadowcloaks

by Benjamin Hewett

  “Put your hand on the wall!”

  “Why? I’m going to need my sword.”

  I don’t have time to argue. I run in the darkness, counting, not because it matters. Not because I know where I am, but because I know Lucinda will follow the sound.

  Phffllilppt.

  My finger passes over one of the divots. I look up and feel some slight breeze but cannot see any light from the city above. I smack the butt of my dagger against the wall and hear nothing.

  Harder.

  Nothing.

  Lucinda catches up, slams into me in the dark. “Oh-hh. There you are,” she whispers, looming somewhere above me. Her arm has gone out.

  I can hear individual footsteps before I find the divot again.

  I’d ask for light, but any light will bring them sooner.

  I trace the chest-high divot with my finger. It feels familiar, the negative shape of something I’ve never had enough of.

  A penny.

  A queenpence.

  I have exactly one left. A special one. The one from the box of rings I took to Fortrus. It isn’t lucky. In fact, I suspect it’s exactly the opposite, tarnished and black, with only a bit of silver shining through. But I still have it.

  “What are you doing?” Lucinda whispers in the darkness.

  “Shh,” I breathe, pointing my voice upward, rummaging through my pockets. “Working.” There must be confidence in my voice, because she shuts up. Or because she knows they’re close.

  Thimble.

  String.

  Bits of rubble.

  One tarnished old queenpence. Aha!

  Nearby the footsteps stop.

  We hold our breath.

  The steps begin again, and I push the queenpence into the hole.

  Click.

  Something shifts, pebbles rattling away into a hole. The wall shifts slightly, so that there is a crack the width of a man’s hand. The right size for a handle or a pull grip.

  The right size for a trap.

  There are men coming, twenty steps away, around a corner. By the number of footfalls, they’ve brought men to scour the sewer and scout the side-shafts.

  There isn’t time for light, for discretion, or for . . . I slide my dagger into the crack, breaking needles and wires in a mangle of metal. When I reach into the crack, I find the handhold and pull. The wall opens.

  “In,” I say, hauling on Lucinda to get her in.

  Get your penny.

  When I pull the penny from the wall, the door begins to close. I slither inside, just in time, brushing against soft skins on the door frame that suck up against the stone door as it closes. I grip the penny and dagger in opposite hands, not daring to hope.

  The sounds of footfall disappear completely, dampened convincingly to an echoing silence. In this silence, the strike of steel on flint startles me. I duck sideways and crouch, smashing my head on stone as I am blinded by the light of a torch.

  “Easy, Teacup.”

  I look up to see Lucinda high above me, holding a lit torch, eyes squinting as she, too, adjusts to the light. “What is this place?”

  Stone steps lead up to the alcove where she is standing, a table with steel and flints, a melon-sized barrel of torch oil, and a rack of four sconces on the wall with unlit torches in each.

  I climb out of the small well that appears to be the silent, secret entrance to this place, and I smell nothing but Pale Tom, his bones, his spit, his poisons, and his spell books. It smells so much like him that my skin crawls, so much more strongly of him here than it ever did at Lantern Street. It’s like crawling through his desiccated carcass, veins stone-hard and empty of blood.

  “This place . . . A mistake. It’s a mistake for us to be here.”

  Not a mistake.

  “Yes, Teacup, but what is it?”

  I don’t say what I’m thinking. Every place has a smell, and even though Tom is dead, this place still smells of him.

  And someone else.

  “It smells like Tom here,” I whisper.

  “Should we wait till they pass and then double back?”

  No. That calculus doesn’t add. How to explain intuition to Lucinda?

  I opt for the easy explanation. “No. The ‘Shades own the sewers now.”

  It’s scary, but I’m beginning to understand Tom, understand how he always arrived a few steps ahead of me and clean as a thistle-whistle.

  I climb out of the door-well and grab a pair of skinny, unlit torches, stuffing one into my belt and lighting the other from Lucinda’s. I stash a flint-and-steel pair from the table into my vest pocket, just in case. Then I look around.

  There is a spiraling staircase going down and away from the well door, with rings on the ceiling every few steps that look strangely like rungs. They’re probably for hoisting cargo up and down from Pan-knows-where, but . . . I spread my arms, judging the distance between them. They’re about the right size for Tom but a little too far apart for me. No matter.

  Lucinda raises her torch a bit, trying to see what I’m looking at. The flame bounces and flickers off whitewashed walls, brown-stone stairs, and wooden handrails. She screws up her face when she sees me clamp the torch between my teeth, cocking my head slightly to keep the flame away from my old, brown hair.

  “Teacup?”

  “Ton’t oosh ta shtepsh.”

  One leap and I’m swinging down into the heart of darkness on a trail of cold, cold metal hung from a forgotten ceiling over a stairwell trapped to the gills.

  THIRTEEN

  “There’s too much water in the ground,” Lucinda says, turning in a circle as we march down another tunnel of melted stone.

  My hand traces a stone wall so smooth and tangy that it feels like hammered copper, or molten gold that has run onto stone and cooled. The wall isn’t metal. I can feel it in my bones. It’s deep stone. Melt-stone. Bones-of-the-world stone. The kind a goblin’d break a tooth on.

  There is something else here.

  A residue. Its sticky, metallic tang saturates the walls and fills the holes. The residue sings a slowly-fading, broken song. Where it runs thin, we find cracks in the coppery stone, and water, or the evidence of it. Here, the stain of sediment has left reddish flecks against the lighter golden-brown, like blood whorls on the inside of a copper ring. The sediment has begun to cake up in places, ringing the smooth tunnel shaft in ridged and rumpled stone-gout.

  In several places the stone-gout is actively growing, drips and trickles of water moving slowly toward the heart of the world.

  Too much water.

  “I know,” I say to Lucinda, but her thoughts are already elsewhere. Her footsteps are thunderous in the relative silence.

  The tunnel is long and turns gradually, a long, sloping arc beneath the city. There are no traps here, not since the pressure plates and false swing-rings at the bottom of the stairwell.

  I can place the residue. It belongs to magii, and not just any magii. The entire tunnel reeks of Tom and someone else. The smell of them is buried in the stone, worked into every inch where there isn’t water. It’s baked into the ground below and the earthen sky above. I feel like blood traveling through his dying artery, or hers. I feel like the tip of a fingernail traveling through an endless set of rings.

  I shiver.

  As we walk, Lucinda’s breathing deepens. “This place is holy,” she says suddenly.

  I shake my head. “I doubt that.” I can feel Tom’s madness curling in on me, and his former power.

  “No. I can feel it,” Lucinda insists. “There is something special about this place.”

  I can’t argue with that. I don’t like admitting it, but my body has taken strength from somewhere. My limp has lessened and the bumps and bruises from the last twenty-four hours are fading away the longer we prowl this underground highway.

  Drip.

  Step.

  Drip.

  Step. Step.

  We come to a door in the wall, on the inside of the ever-turning arc. Lucinda’s
torchlight glistens against the wood grains but hides along dark, tarnished-steel banding. It’s a normal door, like one you might find in any well-kept castle or manor from here to Fortrus. No traps, only a simple lock.

  “Teacup.”

  “We have to keep moving.”

  “Where’s your professional interest?”

  “I am interested. I’m just more interested in finding Carmen.” I don’t tell her that the silent, sleeping part of me whispers what is in that room. Power. And loss of self. I fear it. “It’s not the way out. You saw the stairwell.”

  Lucinda doesn’t budge. “Please.” There’s a softness to her voice that I can’t remember ever hearing. No cattiness from her days as a barmaid, no steel from her Fortrus training, and no guile. Just the soul-need of a battered friend. “Open the door.”

  It’s in there. Something huge and dark and momentous. A power that I don’t want or need. You used to be curious, the old part of me says. You used to love the mystery behind a locked door. This voice sounds like Tom’s.

  “Why should I open that door, Lucinda?” I ask quietly.

  “I need to understand him. There is something behind that door.”

  “What?”

  “I . . . I’m not supposed to talk about it.” From the set of her jaw, I know it will be faster to open the door than to argue.

  I stoop to the lock. “Done.”

  “There’s another door in here.”

  “Oh, for Pan’s sake.”

  “Open it. Please.”

  I follow Lucinda down a short, straight passage.

  The lock imbedded beneath the door handle is so simple I’d barely even consider it a lock. It reminds me of the locks in Fortrus. I trace the exposed face of it with my finger and find a trademark engraved upon the lower rim, half buried in the wood of the door. The three pillars of Alcander.

  It is a lock from Fortrus. It’s the exact same lock on the door to my apartments in Fortrus. Or on Magnus’s door. Or Lucinda’s.

  I feel the blood rushing to my head and fingertips as my muscles tense. With Tom there is no coincidence. I am suddenly prepared to run, and yet utterly unprepared as the door springs open.

  The air. It smells like spring and flowers. Lucinda’s torch blows out as it rushes us, once trapped and now looking for an exit. It’s so fresh that I choke on it at first, accustomed to the rank smell of sewer or the stale, magii-flavored air of Tom’s tunnel.

  I side-step involuntarily, but Lucinda stands in the backwash, hair blowing slightly. Torch extinguished, her face is illuminated by light from inside the room, from a source I can’t see. A luminescent cave lichen?

  In the doorway, a butterfly settles on Lucinda’s nose. It has a velvety-black texture and silver veins of color on its shadowed wings. Lucinda goes crossed-eyed for a moment but doesn’t slap it away. Instead, she wiggles her nose. The butterfly largely ignores this, crawling across her cheek, up a strand of hair to her ear, and from there to the top of her head.

  I watch it maneuver awkwardly, but Lucinda has already forgotten it. She steps into the room.

  “You have to see this, Tea.”

  Her voice is a sigh of contentment. She has stopped in the center of a medium-sized room, hand on the backside of a large throne made of black oak, but is hardly giving it any notice as she stares past it.

  I notice the throne. It looks hard and uncomfortable, but it’s carved with exquisite detail, with shadowcloak wolves in a snowy forest, and shifting clouds. It sits like a pool of darkness in the center of the room, drawing my eye away from everything else . . . away from . . .

  I force myself to follow Lucinda’s gaze. I’m not tall enough to see over the massive, oaken throne so I step around it, ignoring its quiet pull.

  The oaken throne faces a white-stone basin that is as wide as I am tall, and carved even more skillfully than the throne, albeit in non-specific designs. Its graceful, sweeping ridges remind me of the pillars of Fortrus. I can see Tom’s hand in it as sure as I could see his hand in all the most clever thief-traps in Ector. There is grace in its white, sweeping symmetry, and Tom again in the sharp lines and hard edges. The water reflects the pale light of the room, reflects the leaves of the two trees flanking it.

  One tree is sick and thin, with pale, blue-needled leaves on sparse, scrubby branches. It’s certainly malnourished, like some solitary scrub brush clinging for dear life to a shadowed cliff face, bare inches above the stormy, black waves.

  The other tree is a twisted thing that has slowly and carefully been straightened over time. Once a simple bush or vine, it has been pruned, trimmed, and scaffolded until the three-strand trunk has become an upward spiral several times thicker than the other tree. Indeed, the scrubby vine-bush seems determined to rise above its humble origins. About shoulder height, the trunk divides again into its three branches, and again into smaller and smaller branches. At the end of each are drooping strands covered in pink, yellow, and crimson flowers. Red Wisteria. The branches spread wide and thick and healthy in the white-and-blue mosslight, and eclipse more than half of the alabaster basin.

  It is probably the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in Ector, besides the long-dead mother of my children and the woman I’m trying desperately to rescue.

  I turn slowly now, taking in the entire domed room. It’s filled with alabaster pillars, and beyond that, white marble walls, the same stone as in the Abbey chapels of Fortrus. The marble is slick in the perspiration of the cool air and condensation, with moss growing between the cracks and the soft, white light permeating everything. It is warmer here than in the tunnel, warmer like the winter garden in Fortrus, except the butterflies here are mostly black. They perch on the flowers of the red wisteria tree, silver-veined wings fanning slowly, each facing the doorway, until Lucinda decides to close it.

  “Thank you for opening this door, Teacup,” Lucinda says in a choked voice.

  I know she was right to ask, but I say nothing. Here is Tom’s sanctuary, a blend of the double-life that made him. Light and darkness, life and death. Moss, trees, water. The Paladin’s alabaster hidden in the shadow of a Dreadlord’s oaken throne, a drowning man clinging to the light.

  Lucinda seems oblivious to the larger picture, fixating only on the alabaster basin. She steps forward and places a hand on it. The stone around her hand turns a brown and dirty color in the mosslight, clearing gradually as she stands there, eyes closed, lips moving.

  I turn away. It doesn’t feel polite to watch her. Not that it’s super polite to start praying in front of somebody else for no apparent reason. At least she’s being quiet about it.

  I turn in circles. The room is no less a puzzle than any of Tom’s other manifestations. I see beauty, but more than that I see his love for clever things. I examine the alabaster pillars, the throne in the middle, the basin of water, the marble walls. Moss seams running in circles above and below. The door to the Tom-tunnel to the sewer above.

  I know I’m missing something. There is more here.

  I look at the chair again, the calling, black-oak throne of a Dreadlord. In an instant I understand another piece of the Nightshades, though I have never been taught. There is power here, power that the Nightshades in the city above crave. The giant, wooden chair is a focus, much like our rings are a focus. From that seat the entire city will serve me. The entire city will be my home.

  I’ve never wanted power before, but I do want to save Carmen. I step forward, turn, and take a seat.

  Lucinda’s prayer goes shout-alarm audible. “Teacup, don’t!”

  When my skin touches the armrest, as I settle into the giant chair, an invisible hand rips my soul from its moorings. Lucinda’s warning shout rings in distant ears as the world fades to black.

  #

  The world spins.

  Or maybe . . .

  There is no world any more. I can feel myself sinking, sinking, a great tunnel of light diminishing above me as I drown in an ever-growing, black-ocean depth. The pressure mounts until
I cannot sink any more, balanced by equal weight above and beneath, held by darkness that I can never leave. There is a pinprick of light above, barely the size of the smallest of stars.

  My soul floats, black on black on black on black, trapped in the sound of hissing stone. A trap designed for the person stupid enough to sit on a Dreadlord’s throne.

  #

  Tom is here.

  He is darkness on the darkness. This isn’t the calm, cackling, and creepy Tom I knew from The Black Cat. It isn’t even the sardonic, manipulating Tom from my death-dreams. This is something else. Anger, fear, and pure despair mixed in a man-sized soul-tankard.

  “I am sorry, Teacup,” he says quietly. “This throne wasn’t meant for you.”

  Then we are at war, because that is the only way it can be. I flow like smoke from him, weaving and dodging, impossible to catch. He chases me, but there is power leaking to me from the pint-sized body sitting above us in the blackness, while he is just memories and smoke.

  Soon I’m no longer fleeing but pursuing, winning. It’s difficult to say how, but I am walling him off bit by bit, forcing him into the darkness even more, into his prison beneath the ivory room.

  “I’d hoped,” he gasps. “I’d hoped for . . .”

  I am suddenly back in the throne room, and after the blackness this place is pure light. My eyes adjust slowly, and the word death lingers on my mind.

  I can see Lucinda moving through the amber, toward my frozen body. I see my finger poised, as if to wipe a speck from the armrest. We are so slow. Her hand is on my shirt, pulling almost as hard as the chair is pulling me down.

  I lose my lunch, vomiting bile and bread on the sacred fountain as Lucinda yanks me from the chair. Some of it gets on Lucinda. I grin a little bit, though I feel dizzy.

  That’s when she knows I’m okay. “Ew-ww,” she says, dropping me.

  I stand in the mess, disoriented by the added smell, the white light, the sudden sensation of my own body again, and the memory that I have lost something, or forgotten something, and the wooden throne looming behind us holds the answers.